Category:bloghdad.com

Five British citizens were transferred from Guantanamo--where they were held for around two years without charge or judicial review for being "the hardest of the hard core," in Donald Rumsfeld's words--to the custody of the British government--who promptly released them without charge. They tell their stories at length in the UK Observer:

After about a week the prisoners were allowed to speak to detainees in adjacent cells, and a few weeks later still were given copies of the Koran, a prayer mat, blankets and towels. Yet all witnessed or experienced brutality, especially from Guantanamo's own riot squad, the Extreme Reaction Force. Its acronym has led to a new verb peculiar to Guantanamo detainees: 'ERF-ing.' To be ERFed, says Rasul, means to be slammed on the floor by a soldier wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and assaulted.

What fortuitous timing. Last week's announcement of an Iraq-based, Iraqi-run tribunal to prosecute crimes against humanity, including "trying Saddam Hussein in absentia," if necessary, was a convenient pre-emptive strike against too much international meddling. Nice to have those death penalty-friendly ducks in a row just in case, you know, your trail is heating up thanks to intensive intelligence operations and dollar bill serial number-tracking.

New at Bloghdad.com: Lucian K Truscott IV writes a sobering, scathing op-ed in the NY Times which points out the distance and gaps in experience and POV between troops actually deployed in Iraqi towns and the political appointee/apparatchiks at their "hardship posts" in the Green Zone, the Occupation HQ in Saddam's former palace complexes.

An update on Hajji, the Arabic term for "pilgrim" which has become the GWII term for "enemy": it looks like it's not just for GWII anymore. I found a Jan. 2002 usage in a short piece by Lisette Garcia, who writes,

Tampons, alarm clocks and Kodak film were easy enough for me to negotiate at the local Hajji shop. But giving a regulation haircut was simply too foreign a concept in the middle of the desert.

Garcia's talking about the original Gulf War, I think, which gives the term a bit of breathing room, at least as far as its original coiners are concerned.

There are certainly some benign usages of Hajji around, and I can easily see how soldiers, hearing Arabs, Kuwaitis, or Iraqis address each other--or their elders--as "hajji," could adopt it with clean intent. Try justifying the phrase "mowing down some hajjis," though. I dare you.

From Jay Price's article in the Raleigh NandO: USCoalition US troops in Iraq have come up with this war's equivalent of "kraut," "slope," or "gook." They call everyone--everyone else, that is-- "hajji." It's pronounced the way one soldier scrawled it on his footlocker, "Hodgie Killer."

The ever-present, locally run on-base souvenir shops are called hajji shops; when there are several businesses together, they call it Hajji Town. Iraqis out the window of a Humvee, hajji. Kuwaitis and foreign contractors, hajji.

"This is more of a commonsense thing," said [a CentCom spokesman in Baghdad]. "It's like using any other derogatory word for a racial or ethnic group. Some may use it in a joking way, but it's derogatory, and I'm sure people have tried to stop it."

Pretty spin-free, for now. Killing Goliath, who pointed me to the story, got an imaginary spokesman's spin that we can only wish was true: it's like the brotherly love of Jonny Quest and his best friend. "but not in a pederasty sort of way," "said" the soldier.

The real problem is that, to Muslims, hajji is not derogatory at all; it's Arabic for "pilgrim." It's a title of respect and faithfulness, signifying someone who's completed the hajj.

Like gook and kraut, hajji is used to distance oneself and dehumanize the enemy. But unlike past slurs, including GWI favorites like "towel-head" and "sand n***er," hajji also religionizes them. So while Lt Gen. William Boykin preaches with impunity at home about this war against Satan, our unwittingly valiant Christian soldiers are faithfully "mowing down some hajjis" on the front. And intensifying Muslim distrust and hatred of the US.

I've been very quiet about my actual filmmaking activities of late, mostly because they've been pretty sparse. My efforts to re-edit Souvenir November 2001 have been stymied by Final Cut Pro for a while, and I'm coming to grips with the idea of re-building it from scratch. Well, from a late-stage EDL (Edit Directions List), actually, which is the cut-by-cut source code of the film. That'd mean dumping all 80Gb of my media, so it's an irrevocable decision, which I've been avoiding making.

But this week, I've been invited to show and talk about my work in November (More details to come.), so it's about time to pull the trigger. Of course, movement on that will also impel movement on the re-scoring effort, too. Sometimes a deadline can be a very helpful thing.

Beyond this non-working on film, I've been researching and began negotiating for the film rights of a novel. It took a while to trace the rightsholder (the book had been out of print in English for many years and was recently reissued.) and to fill in the backstory of the book's creation. The writer's estate is represented by a small but very sharp agency in Europe, so my very early mornings have been full of iterations on the contract points, a lot of phone calls, etc. Makes me feel productive, but exhausted. It's very interesting and exciting, but not something I can really post about in realtime detail, you understand. As soon as it closes, you'll be among the first to know.

But enough about me. (Heh. As if.) POV points to a new (to me) filmmaker weblog, Nyurotic, which is quite engaging. Ang Mito is a documentarian, whose film screened in the Work In Progress section of this year's IFP Market to very positive reaction. Mito posts her rollercoaster experiences at the Market. Definitely check it out.

Excellent NYT discussion with Steve Young, the screenwriter of NBC's Jessica Lynch TV movie, on how his script changed and took shape as the "definitive" version of Lynch's rescue shifted underneath him.

Besides, as the occupation governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer explained rather presciently on Tuesday, "Freedom matters. I think it's important to ... look beyond the shootouts and blackouts" and just soak in the freedom.